Mid-Week Special: The Bird & The Bee Xmas Cover

Today I'm killing a few birds with one stone. This post kicks off my month-long post-a-thon of Christmas covers by rock bands and other nontraditional styles. It also gives me an opportunity to talk about one of the weirder yet great artists I've recently added to my music library: The Bird & The Bee.

Consisting of Greg Kurstin and Inara George of Los Angeles, The Bird & The Bee are an electronic pop duo that released a self titled album last January. It was a tiny little pop gem of sorts, with melodies that were very sugary but not quite saccharine and witty lyrics to go along with them (see titles like "F*cking Boyfriend").

When I first saw their cover of "Carol of the Bells" on iTunes I had been looking for it, because that is one of my favorite Christmas songs, but I couldn't find it for free anywhere. Imagine my surprise then, when this week's free download of the week was in fact "Carol of the Bells" by The Bird & The Bee. Just when I start to completely lose faith in the iTunes store, they find one tiny little thing to keep me checking in every now and then. Check out the track, and be ready for more to come.


The Bird & The Bee - Carol of the Bells

Mid-Week Special: Arcade Fire & Nada Surf bring on the New Order

With Control entering theatres, I saw the track listing for the soundtrack that came out on iTunes on Tuesday. I have to say, I’m significantly disappointed in the cover of Transmission "Shadowplay" by The Killers (edit: I mixed the song up...turns out the cover was so forgettable that I didn't remember which Joy Division song they were ruining...my bad). I loved Hot Fuss, hated Sam’s Town, but I like some of the b-sides on the forthcoming Sawdust rarities album (small side note: how can a band release a b-side and rarities album after only 2 LPs? It’s not as though these guys never leave the studio…). I’ve never really heard a good cover of a Joy Division song that wasn’t “Love Will Tear Us Apart” so for today’s post I’m pulling out two of my favorite live covers of New Order songs.

The first is a “Blue Monday” cover by Nada Surf. I’m not a huge fan of the band, considering they don’t really sound different from bands like Death Cab For Cutie (whose guitarist produces their albums), but I still really like this cover.

The second is a cover of my favorite New Order song “Age of Consent” by Arcade Fire. I remember the first time I put Power, Corruption, & Lies into my computer and fell in love with it. I also remember my surprise when the song was used in the first trailer for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Win Butler is perfect on the vocals here, and the string section is wonderful as well.



Nada Surf - Blue Monday(New Order Cover)
Arcade Fire - Age of Consent(New Order Cover)

Mid-Week Special: operationBumblebee reads from the Neon Bible

For the first time, I'm going post a cover by somewhat of an unknown. I found this girl, operationBumblebee, on the net that does some solo or a capella covers of indie rock songs, and this cover of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible" is really great. If you haven't seen the interactive video that Arcade Fire put up, go check it out here. I'm not sure if they change the graphics each day, but I haven't seen the same version each time I've shown it to people. It was my second favorite song on the album after "No Cars Go", but I like the a capella aspect and female voice in the cover, so take a listen.


operationBumblebee - Neon Bible (Arcade Fire cover)


In the coming days, I'm going to try and get up a post about an artist I think "You Oughta Know", and maybe something about movies I'd like to see get some attention this coming winter.

Mid-Week Special: KT Tunstall does "The Prayer"

Bloc Party is one of my favorite bands, and most covers that I've heard of their songs usually end up completely disappointing me. Their web site does a fan thing where people can send in their own covers of Bloc Party songs. There are about 15 or so songs I think, but only two of them are any good.

Anyways, KT Tunstall recently did a cover of "The Prayer," which was one of the best songs from A Weekend in the City. I'm actually surprised that I like this cover, seeing as how I'm not the biggest fan of Tunstall's normal music, but I guess that's the nature of covers. I tend to not like songs by an artist, but find their cover of an artist that I like is a great new twist on a song. Here, I think her voice is what makes the song appealing. It's obviously different from Kele Okereke's, but it still has this desperate feeling to it that I found impressive.

Enjoy...coming later this week are my reactions to the openings of Heroes, The Office, and the upcoming new Radiohead album In Rainbows...


KT Tunstall - The Prayer (Bloc Party cover)

Mid-Week Special: The Format do The Lovin' Spoonful

Last summer I spent a month at a film program for high schoolers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where I currently attend college. It was at that time that I was introduced to a wonderful pop band from Arizona called The Format, whose debut album was somewhat of an indie hit.

Their second album Dog Problems came out right as I returned home from that program, and it became the soundtrack of my summer from the first time I put it into my stereo.

The story behind that record was a favorite success story of mine. The Format were dropped by their label after their first album, and their sophomore album contained very obvious references to their hatred of corporate music after having dealt with it's horrendous management personally.

I found this cover a short while ago, and it just exemplifies how much of a perfect pop duo they are. Most of their songs are intricately designed shiny pop songs, and what better song to cover than a classic shiny pop song? So here it is, a cover of The Lovin' Spooful's "Do You Believe In Magic."

I bought the new Foo Fighters' album this week, and a review will go up sometime soon...and more posts will follow as my schedule delves into normalcy now that college classes have started. Just as a small note, VH1 put Foo Fighters' single "The Pretender" in rotation as a "You Oughta Know" video, adding to the lunacy of that segment's supposed "indie spotlight."

The Format - Do You Believe In Magic (The Lovin' Spooful Cover)

Mid-week Special: Glen Hansard covers Justin, Britney

Back in '03 Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears were two extremely popular recording artists in mainstream music. Now, only one of them is still actually active in the music industry. Britney premiered a new track recently called "Gimme More," which was basically her first actual new release in years. Some people have been giving it decent reviews, but it's such a lame song. It blends a terrible call and answer chorus with what sounds like a reject Hyphy rap beat, and it's beyond me how anyone would actually think this is worthy of a comeback. Meanwhile, JT has had monster success with FutureSex/LoveSounds, which is an album I don't particularly like, but can at least respect, unlike almost anything Britney ever released...


Which brings us to today's covers. In Ireland, the radio station Today FM has Irish artists perform covers live on the air. Over the course of a few appearances, Glen Hansard (frontman for the Frames) performed a song by each of the two pop stars. Both of them are pretty straight ahead serious performances of the songs, so the strength of Timberlake's "Cry Me A River" is much more evident. Let's face it, as much as you can hate Justin Timberlake, that song was just phenomenal. Hansard covers "Everytime" by Britney, and since it's not one of the much overplayed, overproduced, and overrated hits in her career, it actually sounds pretty good. Give them a listen, they're a pretty interesting duo of covers.

Glen Hansard - Cry Me A River (Justin Timberlake Cover)
Glen Hansard - Everytime (Britney Spears Cover)

Mid-week Special: Paramore does Foo Fighters

Lately, my semi-guilty pleasure indulgence has been Paramore. They're basically a pop/punk outfit from...well honestly who cares, the focus of the group is squarely on their massively outgoing 19-year-old frontwoman Hayley Williams. They have a very raw energy that appeals to me, and I've been spinning their 2nd album Riot! very frequently over the past couple weeks. So what if they're signed to Pete Wentz's Decaydance Records? The album still packs a huge punch, and that's all that matters.

This cover of Foo Fighters' "My Hero" came from the Sound of Superman album, which was a companion release to the movie Superman Returns last summer. Basically, in an effort to sell items other than movie tickets, Warner Brothers comissioned an album of up-and-coming bands to cover songs about Superman or the idea of a hero for an album. Luckily, it all leaked and people just snatched the tracks up instead of having to support the Superman product line (Superman Returns was by no means anything like Batman Begins). This would fall into the category of a song about the idea of a hero, considering it's from the Foo's best album, The Colour and the Shape, which is about the beginnings and ultimate failings of a relationship, which mirriored the demise of Dave Grohl's marriage with photographer Jennifer Youngblood. This song in particular is always thought of as being about Kurt Cobain, so take that as you will.

It's acoustic, and I really like Hayley's voice, so the cover is really good to me. More news on Foo Fighters coming later, they've got a new record dropping in the fall, but for now enjoy the cover.

Paramore - My Hero(Foo Fighters cover)



random side note: I've been seeing off a lot of friends as they leave for college, as well as packing a lot myself in preparation for when I leave, so posts will be a bit more sparse in the next few weeks, but I'll do my best to post some new tracks, and I've got a post in the works for a Best of Summer list...so that's that.

Mid-week Special: Ben Gibbard Covers Avril in NYC

Ok, so for the second week running I'm hitting 2/3 on the live, cover, and b-sides that are the intentions of these posts. This time it's Ben Gibbard playing at the Knitting Factory in NYC in November of '02. He's covering the "song of the summer" at the time, Avril Lavigne's breakout hit "Complicated." At the time, the song was kind of catchy in an "Mmmbop" sort of way, but it descended into bubblegum pop hell as it was overplayed on the radio and was plastered all over the entire country in a few short months.

Now, given my discontent with the song, why am I posting this cover? For a few reasons:
1. It's still a great pop song, no matter how annoying it is to remember that time back in '02, and I feel no shame in admitting that. Even Hanson had its merits in that little bit of '97.
2. Ben Gibbard turns the song into a light, comedic acoustic track live. It has a different feel when it's just one guy and a guitar crooning while winking with his voice and trying to keep a straight face to a crowd that knows he's trying to be ironic.
3. The banter after he finishes the song is priceless, commenting on what is going on in the song, and how ridiculous it actually is if you pay attention to the lyrics.

Also, as a little commentary on this track, I found an interview with Owen Pallett, who is the violinist for Arcade Fire as well as the act known as Final Fantasy, a snippet of which can be found here .


In the Q&A, he takes a stab at Gibbard for the way he comedically does his cover of Avril, and positing that covers should be serious and without irony because an artist should really love they song they're playing if it's by someone else. Now, the idiocy of naming yourself after the Squaresoft video game series aside, I actually like some of his music as Final Fantasy, but saying that every cover must be straightforward and serious is just being ignorant and stuck up in an attempt to be "holier-than thou". As a matter of fact, Final Fantasy's best two songs are live covers of two other bands: Bloc Party's "This Modern Love" and Arcade Fire's "No Cars Go," so I'm not sure what genius artistic ground he's coming from here way up on his pedestal whining about how bands should perform covers. I think they're a lot of fun, and if the song merits a little tongue-in-cheek comedy and winking at the crowd, such as this Gibbard track, then power to the artist.

As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I don't remember anything about how you go about imitating a certain song being a part of that, which is something Pallett should do well to keep in mind. Parody is still in itself honoring the original artist, as any band that's had Al Yankovich do a song of theirs can attest. Some greats have been humbly honored by the man who's made a career out of making fun of other people's songs, can't Pallett tone down the artsy ego for a little bit so we can just enjoy his music?



Ben Gibbard - Complicated(Avril Lavigne cover)

Mid-week Special: Covers, Live Tracks, & B-sides

Okay, so after a little difficulty in figuring out how to actually upload mp3 files so people can download them (if they read this...), I've actually gotten this site up and running.

I got into reading mp3 blogs about a year ago, when a friend of mine introduced me to the hype machine, which you have to be familiar with if you read an mp3 blog. in keeping with some of my favorite blogs, I'm going to start posting some covers, live tracks, or b-sides from my favorite artists that a lot of people don't have.

So, for the first installment of this, I figured I'd kick it off with a doozy, and one of my all-time favorite covers:
Dashboard Confessional's cover of Weezer's unreleased song "Jamie"

This sort of satisfies two parts of the ideas behind these posts, so it makes me happy. This song was recorded by Weezer during the sessions for The Blue Album back in '94, but sadly never made the album. It saw a cd release when The Blue Album deluxe edition came out, but sadly i don't know when the Dashboard cover was recorded. It's a great acoustic cover by Chris, complete with female backing vocal "ooo-ing" in the background. Classic Weezer. Great cover.


Weezer - Jaime
Dashboard Confessional - Jaime(Weezer Cover)